Grief Digest Articles

We used to live in a townhouse, one of those inventions designed to minimize housekeeping chores, mortgage payments and a tendency to accumulate more things than one needs to cross the Sahara in summer. We moved there because I liked the idea of no yard work, and we would be unburdened by conversations of "It's-Saturday-so-mow-the-lawn." I hate housework (it hates me too!), and we wanted a less complex life.Smaller places do have a certain appeal...especially during the "It's Spring and that mea …

My sister the psychiatrist has a favorite expression: “Prozac should be in our water supply. We all need some.”It seems everyone these days is on some type of antidepressant. I hear it discussed in the locker room of the health club, in the grocery store, at the post office. “So, what kind of antidepressant are you on?” It’s the collective song of a nation obsessed with fixing every detail with pills. We’re busy, there’s no time for talking or working out our problems. Just throw drugs at it! Ps …

From the heart of Bill WhittakerMy wife, Helen, and Fred Astaire went way back. At least, it seemed that way to me. It started in the 1960s, when Helen moved from Connecticut to Chicago to take a job as a dance instructor at the Fred Astaire Dance Studio in the Loop district.Some twenty years later, Helen and I were in Paris when Fred Astaire died. We got the news on French television. Our language challenge was broken when a Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire movie was broadcast in tribute to the d …

I’m the healing father I am today because of the people I met yesterday, and the yesterday before that and the yesterday before that, and on and on. Many of those people jumped in and jumped out, leaving me with fleeting bits of goodness. Others jumped in in a dark way, but I’m grateful for them too because of the lessons I’ve learned by how I reacted to their darkness. A few precious people stuck to me, embedding themselves like a cherished memory. Many of those who stuck to me are parents who …

(the Norman Rockwell way)Shirley’s husband of forty-two years died suddenly of a heart condition. Brittany’s husband has served in the U.S. Army in Iraq for the past nine months. This was supposed to be their first Christmas together, but he won’t be home. Martha is homebound and lives in an assisted living facility; her family is hundreds of miles away. Stuart’s son died; everyone asks how his wife is doing, but no one asks how he is feeling. Shelley was recently divorced and lives with her mot …